Opposite the Cross Keys (18 page)

Nellie Smith eyed the small upwelling with suspicion.

‘You sure that's it? Not some ol' pipe what's sprung a leak?'

‘There aren't any pipes out here. ‘Course I'm sure!'

Nellie Smith squatted on her haunches and filled the jar at the spring. She still looked unconvinced.

‘It don't feel different from any other water to me.'

Tears of anger and remorse filled my eyes and made the spring waver. I had betrayed Tom's confidence for nothing. ‘Last time I tell you a secret, I can promise you that!' The water, once captured and still in the jam jar, did indeed look like any other old water. ‘Don't know what you want it for, anyway!'

For a moment Nellie Smith's mood softened. She became almost pleading.

‘I told you – the old un. She told me, to be any good, it has to be real, virgin water.'

‘Any good for what?' I challenged, unappeased. ‘And what's virgin water, anyway? There isn't any such thing!'

‘There is!' the other disputed hotly. ‘Like in the Virgin Mary. You know what the Virgin bit means in the Virgin Mary, don't you?'

‘Of course I do!' But I spoke without conviction. I had never thought about it. ‘It's her name,' I ventured rashly. ‘Like yours is Nellie Smith.'

‘Tha's jest where you're wrong, then! You never heard of nobody else 'cept her called that.'

‘Because there was only one of her, that's why, silly!'

‘That isn't why she's called –' Nellie Smith broke off and cast her eyes up to heaven. ‘Gawd gi' me strength! Where was you brought up, fer Christ' sake? A virgin –' she began again, composing herself for the lesson – ‘is a special kind of mauther –'

‘Special how?'

‘Special that she ain't ever bin wi' a bloke.' After a pause: ‘You're one yourself, if you want to know.'

I laughed outright.

‘But I've been with millions of blokes! There's my father, and my brother Alfred, and Mr Fenner, and Tom and Charlie and –'

Nellie Smith looked at me in silence and my list petered out betimes. I began to feel uncomfortable – as if, though I truly didn't know what she meant by never having been with a bloke, something deep inside me, something that was a me I hadn't even been introduced to, did know, or, at any rate, had an inkling. Or an inkling of an inkling.

‘Ferget it,' Nellie Smith said, unexpectedly gentle. ‘I must've got it wrong. What the old un said was that if I could get hold of some water from a spring what come straight out of the earth an' never been anywhere else first, an' if I give some to that bloody Chink what keeps coming round, she won't come round no more – not her nor that swanky car o' hers neither. It'll keep them both away like Flit keeps the bloody flies off.' She leaned towards me and gave me a quick peck on the cheek which so surprised me I nearly lost my balance on the muddy ground. I could feel the filled jam jar pressed between us. ‘If it works,' Nellie Smith promised, ‘it'll be all your doing.'

By the time we got back to the encampment Nellie Smith's dress was dark all down the front from water which had spilled out of the jar. The top was not a good fit.

‘It don't matter,' she said. ‘There's plenty left.'

It seemed a doubly long way back. I was very tired. Nellie Smith looked as fresh as when she'd started. We didn't have much to say to each other. I found myself thinking about the Virgin Mary, but only in a desultory way. Sadie and Pauline, the children of Mr Hooper the barber, thought about her all the time, they said, because they were Roman Catholics and had to. I made a mental note to ask them about the Virgin bit to her name, when I got back to Norwich.

The sun was low as we came down the last part of the road. It shone straight into our eyes, so that I did not immediately see, as we came abreast of the opening into the encampment, that Miss Lee was a few yards inside the field, in her little red car, revving up the engine as if she were getting ready to move out into the road.

As usual, I parted from Nellie Smith at the entrance, and, as usual, I hung around for a little, to see what there was to be seen in that maddening land for which I possessed no passport. The old un was sitting on her caravan steps sucking on her pipe like an ancient baby. Nellie Smith's father stood at the further side of the car, as if he had just been saying goodbye to Miss Lee. The Chinese girl's beautiful face was half-turned towards him, so that all I could see from where I stood was a high-boned cheek brushed by long black lashes.

Lit by the setting sun, the bushy red hair of Nellie Smith's father stood out round his head like a halo. He looked as if he were on fire. It was a pity the rest of him was not beautiful like his hair, and that he was not a gentleman either. Salham St Awdry had taught me that you did not – as, back in Norwich, I had been led to believe – have to dress and speak and use your knife and fork in a certain way to qualify as a gentleman. Mr Fenner was one, and so was Tom. About Charlie I had not made up my mind, but about Nellie Smith's father I was quite sure. He was not a gentleman and never would be, not if he lived to be a hundred.

He looked at Nellie Smith as she came through the opening, but he did not say anything. Nellie Smith did not say anything either. Miss Lee, low down in the sports car, looked up at the girl hesitantly, as if unsure what expression to put on her painted face.

Miss Lee said, ‘Hello.'

Nellie Smith plucked the lid off the jam jar and flung the contents into Miss Lee's face.

I ran away because I was afraid to stay and witness what I knew was going to happen. Well, perhaps. On reflection, I don't know whether, in fact, I ran away slower than I intended to, and so saw something; or if I ran away with all speed and only imagined what I thought I saw because I expected it to happen.

What I either saw or imagined, then, was the Chinese girl with the water from Tom's spring making channels in her white face powder, water running out of the corners of her mouth, which was the same colour as her car. I saw or imagined her blouse transparent with wet, the nipples on her small breasts visible through the thin fabric. I saw or imagined Nellie Smith, still clutching the jar, looking at her father with a look of challenge and expectation on her face; and her father's hands moving with a horrid slow-motion towards the wide leather belt which supported his paunch. He took the belt off, and ran one hand along it affectionately, testing its potentiality for pain. The ornate silver buckle shone in the sunset. And then he –

But no. I must have imagined it all, I ran away from the gypsy encampment so fast. I ran home to Opposite the Cross Keys, praying in great gulps to the Virgin Mary not to let Nellie Smith get hurt even though I wasn't a Roman Catholic. Sadie and Pauline Hooper would give me a reference, if she wanted one.

Ahead of me, once I had rounded the bend by the Swan, I saw that Ellie's chair, out on the pavement, was empty, so I knew that the Fenners must have sat down to their tea. Tom would be there, his face lifted with love as I came through the door, his hands fishing out of the pockets of his old army coat the particular treasure – acorn, pebble, sensationally striped brandling – which he had set aside for my delectation that day. I snivelled a little to think that I could never go with him to the spring again. I was not worthy.

The living-room was dark, but not so dark as to need the lamp lit, for which I was grateful. I could not tell what might be there to be read in my face.

‘You took your time,' Mrs Fenner remarked amiably, as she got up to spoon on to my plate some of the mess remaining in the saucepan.

I ate voraciously, and made no polite demurrals over accepting the one and only second helping. The meal over, I fell asleep on the sofa before my bed was even made up, my last conscious intimation of the day the prickle of horsehair on my bare legs and arms. Mrs Fenner must somehow have inveigled a pillow under my head and wrapped a blanket round me, but I have no recollection of it. When I woke up next morning, still fully dressed, I found that Tom had tucked a couple of cock pheasant's feathers into the carving next to my head, to keep me company.

On Saturday Mrs Fenner went up to Norwich for the day as usual. She had expected me to accompany her, but I said I would rather not, if she didn't mind. To that she returned, ‘Please yourself,' not in a nasty way, but as if pleasing myself was what she wanted me to do most in the world.

When I saw her got up for the journey, in her coat with all the buttons and her go-to-Norwich hat, I almost changed my mind. But in the end I was glad I hadn't, because then I couldn't have seen her off on the bus, for all as if I were the one who belonged to St Awdry's and she the visitor.

Instead of going to Norwich, I went with Mr Fenner to his allotment. He didn't exactly ask me to go with him and I didn't exactly ask to go – we were both too shy with each other for the suggestion to be put into words – but I could tell by the way he brushed his moustache with his forefinger, a brief staccato swish, first to one side, then the other, that he was glad to have me along. I had noticed that it was a gesture he only made when he was pleased about something.

Just the same he asked, ‘Sure you wouldn't rather be off playin' wi' that young gyppo gal?'

‘Quite sure.'

I hadn't seen Nellie Smith since the incident with the spring water. I hadn't gone to the encampment and she hadn't come looking for me, either, for which I was grateful. I had spent a lot of time and effort since that Wednesday evening trying not to think about her, and even more trying to unthink the thoughts which came regardless.

Mr Fenner normally worked on Saturdays like any other day. He had the day off because his war wounds were troubling him, as they did from time to time. The farmer he worked for was a man who had fought in the war himself and knew what it had been like, and so wouldn't dock his pay for taking time off.

I never knew the exact nature of Mr Fenner's war wounds, only that they had affected his walk, so that, although the only alcohol he ever drank was a single half-pint on Armistice Day, he rolled along as if he had had too much to drink. As a result of this trouble in keeping his balance, he hadn't been able to ride a bicycle since coming back from the war, and so a grateful country had provided him with a tricycle, which, Mr Fenner said, was such a pleasure to ride, it was almost worth getting yourself blown up for.

Apart from anything else, he said, the tricycle seat was so much more comfortable than a bicycle one, and he needed a well-padded place for his bum ever since, plodding along the Somme with a box of ammunition big as a house, he had sat down for a minute to take a load off his feet; and, blow him, if he hadn't sat down square on the spike of a Prussian helmet buried in the mud. The bloody thing had gone straight up his back passage.

Laugh? His mates had nearly bust a gut. But it weren't such a laugh for him, landed with a sore arse for the rest of his natural. Nor, come to think of it, for the helmet's owner, either. When his mates had got a grip on the ruddy thing and pulled, blow him if it didn't come away with the head of the bloody Hun still inside it.

Tricycles were fine for passengers as well as for riders with tender arses. You stood erect on the bar between the back wheels, your hands resting lightly on the driver's shoulders, perfectly secure and with a splendid view of the surrounding landscape. No other conveyance, except perhaps the Royal Coach, with its knee-breeched lackeys clinging on to the back, could give one such a feeling of consequence.

The allotment, along with Mr Fenner's campaign medals and the tricycle, was one more bonus for helping to save the world for democracy, ex-servicemen being excused the yearly rental of half-a-crown demanded of civilians. Mr Fenner's was a model of its kind, astonishing compared with the patch of
maquis
laughingly dubbed garden at Opposite the Cross Keys, where he grew nothing except the noxious weed he insisted on calling tobacco. The exquisite order of the ten square rods in Back Lane was enough to bring tears to the eyes. Mr Fenner tended them with a loving care tinged with melancholy – the latter, I could only guess, brought on by the knowledge that all his lovely victuals were doomed to end up as the same unidentifiable mush in Mrs Fenner's saucepan.

‘Look at that cauli, will yer?' Mr Fenner would invite, giving the creamy curd a congratulatory pat. ‘Snow don't come no whiter.' And he would sigh heavily before passing on to the next beauty along the row.

Whenever I went with him to the allotment, Mr Fenner, as if to make sure that some at least of his produce had not lived in vain, would press me to eat as many raw vegetables as I had a mind to, or a stomach for. (They were, I suppose, the only food I ever ate in Salham St Awdry which was good for me.) There was a little shed on the allotment which contained gardening tools and a pile of
Old Moore's Almanacs
falling apart with damp, but was mostly taken up by an outsize wicker armchair in the last stages of dissolution. This shed was Mr Fenner's study, his snuggery, hermitage, to which I felt deeply privileged to be admitted; and there, after the weeding and the watering were done, would we repair, together with a selection of whatever were deemed the choicest of that day's delicacies; he to his chair, which, beneath his weight, creaked and groaned like the rigging of a three-master ploughing a heavy sea; me to one of its residual cushions – chintz chrysanthemums glazed with a delicate mould which rose in the air like talcum powder when I took my place at Mr Fenner's feet.

When he was not entertaining guests, I reckon, Mr Fenner sat enthroned in his chair in quiet content, munching his carrots and peas, and mulling over his vintage
Old Moores
. When he had company – i.e. me – he talked about the Great War.
His
war.

To listen to Mr Fenner, anyone would think the war had been won by horses – Tickler, Bruno, Benjy and Chow, to name but a few, every one of them the recipient of the Victoria Cross, if there were any justice in the world. Mr Fenner would go red in the face with emotion as he recounted the saga of Tickler, who had got supplies to a beleaguered outpost when the entire Transport Command had declared the mission impossible: or Chow, who, despite a rain of enemy shrapnel, had dug in his hooves alongside a collapsed barn and refused to budge until the men who had come to fetch him away finally cottoned on, and dug his unconscious rider out of the rubble. I heard how Barley Mo, bearing a cavalry officer obviously bent on fighting the wrong war, had tipped the bloody fool into a quickthorn hedge and by his quick thinking saved the lives of a regiment, if not an entire division; and Barnum and Bailey, two Suffolk Punches who, unaided, had charged a Boche tank and accepted the surrender of its animal-loving crew. The tales were endless, the recital interrupted only by expressions of anger at the insufficiency of recognition accorded the four-legged heroes who alone had made victory possible.